The first thing that strikes you is the keyboard. While it might seem like the keys are placed annoyingly close together, the individual buttons actually benefit from being slightly raised. This makes them distinct enough to get up a good typing speed, even if you’re unlikely to use the Centro to bash out your life story.

Our only real annoyance here is with what we’ll call the ‘Control’ and ‘Capital’ keys. The ‘Control’ key lets you type the second symbol placed above a key’s regular function, while the ‘Capital’ key makes letters big. The way our brain works, a key with an arrow pointing up means you’ll be choosing that second smaller symbol sitting over the regular letter. However, that’s not the case. The key with the arrow is the ‘Capital’ key and it’s actually the white key that toggles the ‘Control’ action. Even a month’s worth of daily use couldn’t get us out of this bad habit and much money was poured into the office swear box because of it.

Thankfully, the keyboard is backed up by a touchscreen, which allows for a mix of controls. The screen is slightly recessed into the device which should help protect it from rubbing up against things in your pocket. That depression did collect dust and dirt quite easily, though.

Being a Windows Mobile user (no choice really when your contacts are all stored in Outlook) we were eager to see what the Palm OS could do in its most modern form. Unfortunately, like so many other phones we test out, the software just can’t handle importing an address book in the exact same format it appears in Microsoft Outlook. This lack of compatibility is extremely annoying when you consider Outlook is an established piece of software and has been around for many years. OK, so we store our entries in a non-standard way (Company name - Name of Contact), but why is that so hard to transport?

To try and get around this issue we exported our contacts as a file in a number of formats and tried to import them into Palm’s software. However, it made no difference and we were still left with jumbled contacts: some with the contact name but no company; some the same but vice versa; and a few with no name at all!

That wasn’t the end of the Centro’s syncing crimes, though. When it connects with Outlook, it makes changes to the way calendar items are displayed within the Microsoft program. For example, periods that were previously shown as full weeks were split up into individual days. Technically the information is still there and nothing was removed, but as we like to view our entries as whole weekly or weekend events this was again very annoying.

(Continued on next page)

The Palm Centro smartphone comes with Google Maps as standard